Right after the Slap Live #13 event we were feeling pretty confident about how things were going and definitly felt that this was just the beginning for our succeses after changing our line-up back to the way it was before CGS. After a tiring journey home from Slap there was little time to practise let alone change tactics and setups, but we figured we could do it with the ones we had for a little while longer. So we started our journey to France fridaynight pretty late because darky had his final exam to get his drivers license, which he passed (hoorai to him)! :-) We arrived right around 2 am in the morning at the city we were supposed to be at, Colmar, we still had no idea where the event was so that took us another hour to find it and then go back to check in to a decent hotel, after about a 4 hour sleep we packed up our stuff and took our pcs to the event.

After some fumbling with my malfunctioning harddrive we began to install our CSS gui that digitalsace put on the intranet for the event. After a few hours we finally got that done and we were ready to go, unfortunatly the servers were still down and forced us to find other ways to keep ourself occupied. since there was no internet, we had to do something else, a game we found out a few weeks before, in Warcraft 3: Towerdefense and had a few laughs playing that ;-D. After about 9 or 10 hours of delay we finally started our first groupmatches, luckily there werent 10 groupstage matches as scheduled prior to the event but 6, after playing all of those in a couple of hours time we were feeling pretty exhausted from our lack of sleep the night before and headed back to the hotel the event had reserved for participants of the event, which unfortunatly turned out to be a really crappy place. Only about 1 or 2 showers and toilets per 20 rooms or so. None of us really had the time to wait that long so we headed straight for the event again early in the morning.

Not feeling particularly fresh and awake :-p After another delay of 2 or 3 hours we finally got our first match of the day underway, facing our toughest opponents as of yet, Paris Bitchezz, the team consisted of an all star french lineup which we knew we had to buckle down to get the win, After a close d2 match and listening to xertions whine about his fps. We played the semi finals of the event and came through that match without to much effort. A short break was scheduled before the finals in which I, and several other teammates such as darky completely collapsed, i myself was litterely asleep in the warmup of the final, which led to probably my worst game ever.

After losing this not-so-exciting final we didnt really felt down or extremely dissapointed with what happened, we felt we really didnt had any preperation on the event to face these very well playing frenchies and the circumstances were far from ideal considering the hotel and the lack of sleep and extremely mindnumbing delays. We headed back to the hotel, very nice hotel we stayed in the first night and booked the room for another night, i whipped out my pokerset and we orderded a couple of beers and had a great time just hanging out, after which we got a nice sleep and headed back home in the morning. We all got home safely later that night :)

After this epic failure we knew we had to start making some drastic changes in the way we had gone about playing for the past 9 months or so, something which is really hard to do when u only have a week to make enough changes to surprise people, but not too much so that we were clueless about what we were doing. After a couple of days of going through some new strats and getting a couple of pcws down, we didnt really feel that it was going well with these updated strategy's, but we kept going in the hopes that we would improve fast enough. Unfortunatly our preperation came to an abrupt end 2 days before the event, xertion ordered several new high-priced high-performance hardware bits which he installed imidiatly when he got them, but knowing xertions lack-of-expertise in PC matters something went epicly wrong ;D It looked like he might have short-circuited some parts of his new PC which resulted in that he couldnt get his PC on, so unfortunatly we could'nt practise anymore in which we felt were gonna the most important days of our preperation, C'est la vie i thought but i figured we needed a miracle to play up to our usual standards and win this event filled with topteams.

We headed to the fnatic office thursday morning after which we spent a day of doing nothing really but being bored and sitting around in the office ;=), When we went to bed on thursday we kept our fingers crossed if our lazy manager Sammy got up in time to take us to the event, well he did actually but some other unfortunate stuff going on (our driver having to work longer then expected) we arrived late at the event.

We got ourselves some packard bell pcs that gom8z got us (ty sir) we started downloading source on it which obviously didnt go very fast, after about an hour or 2 we got CSS on dvd and got it installed and ready after 30 minutes, quickly after we found out that on the intranet the admin put us in for a default loss for showing up late. Thanks to great sportsmanship from the opponents and my stunning powers of pursuasion we got to play that match anyway. After the groupstages we got back for a short sleep and headed back to the event the next morning.

Soon after the usual casualties fell to the heavy circumstances at LAN events, blaze came down with something and we were all feeling pretty crappy, but the show must go on and we continued on doing not so great since our unfortunate lack of preperation, after losing to Reason it was clear to me the miracle that needed to happen for us to win this event, and we knew the pressure was still on our shoulders because everyone expected us to do so. After screwing the Mint match on nuke up epicly i felt (as some people may have been a witness to) very dissapointed, us ourselves knew about the unfortunate circumstances that led to this dissapointment but a dissapointment is still a dissapointment (lol!)

Since the event xertion has still been waiting for his PC to come back from the store, theyre still figuring out if he can get new free parts, i hope he does cause he spent alot of money on it and i wont have to listen to his fps whine anymore ;-D. Xertion only managed to play at a friends house when we have an official match for ESL, or the packard bell cup so we're hoping we can sail through untill we have time to practise again, which we certainly will. I'm sure after these few dissapointments we'll come back stronger than before with a new set of strategy's and setups :-)

Yours sincerely,

Sandor 'proph' de Munck